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In 2024, 0.0001pc of total streams generated more than $10,000 on average.
Spotify said that it has paid out a record-setting $10bn to the music industry last year – higher than any other streaming service. However, it seems that only the top artists are seeing profits.
In its Loud and Clear report released yesterday (11 March), the streaming platform noted that its payouts to songwriters and music publishing rights holders surpassed $4.5bn over the past two years.
Highly streamed artists are seemingly making more, with the number of artists generating between $1,000 and $10m in annual revenue having tripled since 2017.
Moreover, the number of female artists who generate more than $1m annually has quadrupled since 2017, the report noted. Although, that could have been because of a surge in pop consumption worldwide, primarily led by female artists.
However, according to a report from Duetti released in January, the amount that artists earned per 1,000 streams across platforms reduced on average since 2021.
In 2024, Spotify paid artists only $3 per 1,000 streams. In comparison, artists earned $8.80 for the same number of streams on Amazon Music.
In general, only 15pc of songs that “go viral” on TikTok saw an increase in royalty payouts last year, the report found.
The Duetti report elicited strong criticism from Spotify, which disputed its numbers and “unattributed guesses”.
A spokesperson for the platform told news outlets at the time that Spotify wants users to “engage more so that they pay more – both by sticking around and choosing premium”. The platform currently has 252m premium subscribers, a major share of the estimated 667m users of paid music streaming services globally.
“We are proud to be the leader in total payouts, but that doesn’t happen by accident; it’s by design,” the Spotify spokesperson continued, adding that the Duetti report is “out of step with the reality of how the industry works”.
However, in Tuesday’s Loud and Clear report, Spotify itself noted that the 100,000th ranked artist on the platform earned $6,000 in 2024, a 10-fold rise since 2014.
“Streaming services don’t pay out based on a fixed per-stream rate – just like listeners don’t pay per song they listen to,” reads the report. “In 2024, 0.0001pc [one in 10 thousand] of total streams generated over $10,000 on average.”
Although, this means that more than half of all the approximately 225,000 emerging or professional recording acts on the platform globally don’t make enough from their streams to earn a living, according to Spotify’s own numbers.
The Loud and Clear report comes after a recent report from Music Business Worldwide which wrote that Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek has cashed out more than $660m in shares in the company since 2023, while Martin Lorentzon, the company’s other co-founder, cashed out close to $560m in shares in 2024 alone.
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